"Due Process For All" Shouldn't Mean Some Get More Of It Than Others
Sarah Merriman, a spokeswoman for SAFER Campus, opposes a new campus due process bill, showing contempt for basic rights for those accused in sexual assault cases, writes Ashe Schow at WashEx.

Merriman: Schools "must prioritize the needs of survivors first and foremost."

Schow:

That's all well and good, but one does not know whether someone is truly a "survivor" unless his or her story can hold up to scrutiny, something deliberately absent from current campus hearings.

...Due process for all means due process for all, not due process for only accusers.

If opponents of the bill, like Merriman, think due process is such a hindrance to justice, why aren't they calling for its removal in all aspects of the legal system?

Ban It And They Will Come
One of the best ways to make something exciting is to make it forbidden.

Well, Cosmopolitan magazine is about to get a little sales help from Food Lion and Rite Aid. Hiroko Tabuchi writes for The New York Times:

The two retailers will soon place issues of Cosmopolitan magazine behind "blinders" to shield minors from the magazine's sexual content, they confirmed separately on Friday.

Kristin Kellum, a Rite Aid spokeswoman, said the retailer would "continue to carry" Cosmopolitan but was "working to place future issues of this publication behind pocket shields." Rite Aid operates about 4,600 drugstores across the country.

Food Lion, which runs 1,100 grocery stores in the Southeast and mid-Atlantic, will require Cosmopolitan's publisher, Hearst, to provide a holder that would shield the cover, according to Christy Phillips-Brown, a company spokeswoman. The plastic blinders are U-shaped and hide the headlines that appear around the outside of the cover, but do not hide the cover model or the Cosmopolitan banner that runs across the top of the magazine.

Um, on the Internet, kids can watch people having a threesome with a pony.

It's so quaint anybody thinks the equivalent of the old brown paper wrapper is going to do anything but make people want to look behind it. Especially the people whose eyes it's supposed to be kept from. That is, if they aren't too glued to their phones to care.

--14th-century scam

Hey, Israel Bashers: Israel Is A Model For Gay Rights
There was an awful and disgusting stabbing by an Orthodox Jewish nutbag at a gay rights parade in Israel.

In the week of tweets like "Will the Zionists continue their pinkwashing campaign?", David Kaufman writes a little "ahem" note to the Israel bashers in the NY Post:

As the tragic attack on Jerusalem's Gay Pride parade Thursday proves, even a nation as safety-conscious as Israel is prone to colossal failures of security and intelligence. But as the outrage subsides and the injured heal, Yishai Shlissel's stabbing spree must be considered for what it is: a relatively isolated incident in a nation that takes its LGBT citizens very seriously.

Need proof? How about progressive LGBT military, marriage and employment-protection policies that long preceded their US equivalents. Or ample state and municipal funding for LGBT education and social-service initiatives.

Or an atmosphere of tolerance and acceptance that has made Tel Aviv one of the most openly LGBT towns on the planet. Or the immediate outrage from Israeli politicians -- from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on down -- condemning Thursday's horror.

These are not mere propaganda posings, but national realities that sharply contradict the growing portrayals of Israel as anti-democratic.

Meanwhile, the silence continues from gay rights activists about the Islamic command that gays be slaughtered -- and the fact that this actually happens in Islamic majority countries.

There are several methods by which sharia jurists have advocated the punishment of gays or lesbians who are sexually active. One form of execution involves an LGBT person being stoned to death by a crowd of Muslims; this precedence was set in the hadith Abu Dawud which states "Whoever you find doing the action of the people of Loot, execute the one who does it and the one to whom it is done", then elaborates they be "stoned to death".[17] The majority of Muslim jurists established an ijma ruling that LGBT people be thrown from rooftops or high places,[18] and this is the perspective of most Salafists.[19]

Hangings of gays in Iran meets with silence from the West, including the activists so busy hissing at Israel on Twitter and elsewhere.

Obamacare Is Unicorn-Care: Fines Rise As Subsidies Go To People Who Don't Exist
Eric Boehm writes at Watchdog.org:

The IRS fined more than 7.5 million Americans who didn't have health insurance in 2014, even as Obamacare subsidies flowed to people who didn't even exist.

...Penalties will increase to $395 or 2 percent of income per person in 2015; that will jump to $695 or 2.5 percent of income in 2016.

Those penalties are supposed to force Americans to purchase health insurance -- or to at least make it financially wise for them to do so.

...But an investigation by the Government Accountability Office recently revealed that fake applicants who enrolled in health insurance programs through the federal exchange were receiving subsidies. Those phony applicants had initially enrolled during 2014, but they were automatically re-enrolled and continued to benefit from tax subsidies in 2015, the GAO said.

The application process used by the Healthcare.Gov federal exchange is not set up to detect fraud, concluded Seto Bagdoyan, chief of GAO audits and investigations, who submitted testimony to the Senate Finance Committee earlier this month.

Still! Nice Prices For People Who Sometimes Say F*ck
Today again, my book seems to be on special or at an oddly low price at Amazon -- half off, at $7.61 (list price $14.99). Not sure how long it will stay that way (might be part of a pricing algorithm at Amazon).

It's a science-based and funny book on how we can behave less counterproductively.

Along with positive reviews in the WSJ and other publications, Library Journal gave the book a starred review: "Verdict: Solid psychology and a wealth of helpful knowledge and rapier wit fill these pages. Highly recommended."

Orders of the book (new only, not used!) help support my writing on this blog and my answering questions that won't make my column.

"Empathic Correctness": Opinions As Aggression On Campus
For me, one of the greatest things about college was the exposure to new ideas, including ideas that made me uncomfortable. This is what college is supposed to be about -- or was.

What began in the 1990s as political correctness - a desire not to offend others - has now morphed into what one academic observer calls "empathetic correctness" - a desire never to be offended. Even celebrities have weighed in on the debate, with comedians Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher saying the environment at college makes it almost impossible to do their routines without someone becoming upset.

While many have pointed to helicopter parenting or the mainstream media as root sources of a politically correct culture on campus, much of the criticism is oversimplified, academics say.

According to professors and higher-education experts, the trend is driven by financial realities in the American higher education system, and exacerbated by a contemporary world in which opinions are catalyzed and publicized by the intellectual echo chamber that can exist online. With a drop in the number of college-age students, as well as decreased funding from states, increased competition among colleges and universities has resulted in an atmosphere where students are treated like consumers and more emphasis may be placed on their satisfaction rather than how much they are learning, critics charge.

Professors can feel disincentivized to bring up controversial issues up in class for fear of getting in trouble either with administration or with students that they may offend, critics say.

It's Free Speech We Need To Support On Campuses, Not Free Squelch
I'm one of the moderators of a members-only science forum -- one with quite a few academics as members.

Well, in response to a post linked there -- one I put up at the Applied Evolutionary Psychology Society blog -- a male member of the science forum remarked (about the experience of the author of the article I linked):

arrrg. sounds like someone went into a feminist hugbox and thought they were meeting social scientists.

"Feminist hugbox." Love that term.

But not everyone did.

A woman responded:

I think that you need to seek an education on what feminism means and to be more mindful of the terms you are using within a professional/academic forum. Frankly, your patriarchal ignorance is embarrassing.

My response to the woman:

I don't think there's just one meaning of feminism.

I don't call myself a feminist -- I call myself a humanist because I'm for fair treatment for all people, meaning that if you're a man who's had your rights violated, I'll stand up for you.

I also find that feminism, as of late, often involves women demanding special rights under the guise of equal rights.

I also think [the man's] "feminist hugbox" was funny.

And finally, isn't there enough speech-squelching on college campuses? I think we need to support free speech.

I support your right to your scoldy speech, too, by the way, but I just think you should also think about what feminism "means" and whether it has, in some part, turned pernicious.

Shielding Tender College Students From Any Possible Offense
The University of New Hampshire has published a "Bias-Free Language Guide," reports the NY Daily News:

Among the terms declared off-limits is "American."

Using the A-word is "problematic" because it "fails to recognize South America." Approved alternatives: "U.S. citizen" or "resident of the U.S." (Which is short for United States of . . . oh, dear.)

The guide would also replace "seniors" with "people of advanced age," "overweight" with "people of size," "poor" with "person who lacks the advantages others have," "rich" with "person of material wealth" and "healthy" with "non-disabled."

Why not just fit every incoming student with a muzzle in the school colors?

UC Prez Napolitano Talks About "Looking Into" Due Process For Men -- As If Looking For A Lost Scarf
Sexual assault accusations made against men (mostly men and a woman here or there) in college have led to their being stripped of their due process rights and having their fate decided in campus kangaroo courts.

UC's Napolitano, speaking at a Senate hearing on campus sexual assault, was asked by Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy (R) how schools could better address the rights of the accused. Ashe Schow writes at WashEx:

Napolitano jumped in, saying "we're actually looking in to that right now." This would seem to indicate that such rights were not considered previously -- certainly not last year when she convened a task force to address the issue of campus sexual assault.

The University of California, over which Napolitano presides, was recently excoriated by a federal judge for providing students with an "unfair" hearing. Perhaps that is why Napolitano is "now" looking into due process rights.

When Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate HELP committee, asked the panelists how to ensure a fair hearing is held involving an accusation of sexual assault, a noticeable six-second silence followed.

Napolitano again mentioned that UC was "looking into" the issue of due process rights, but the way she talked about what those rights should look like was dismaying.

"It does illustrate the difference between a student disciplinary proceeding and a criminal proceeding," Napolitano said. "The confrontation rights, for example, they should be different for students."

She also mentioned that her school was "going through that right now," an allusion a recent case in which a California judge ruled that the university provided an inadequate procedure for cross-examination. The student was allowed to submit questions only before the hearing, and the hearing panel decided which questions to ask, leaving out questions that would challenge the accuser's side of the story. The panel also provided no follow-up questions and allowed the accuser to avoid answering by claiming the questions were irrelevant.

Again, sexual assault accusations belong in the justice system and not the campus system.

Navy Offers Special Perk For People Who Reproduce (If They're Female)
The LA Times editorial board thinks this is a fabulous idea:

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced in May that he was planning to increase paid maternity leave for sailors from six to 12 weeks. It was one of a number of changes designed to make his branch of the armed forces more attractive to women -- and to keep them once they signed up.

Then he doubled down. When Mabus finally unveiled his new policy this month, it was even more generous than promised -- 18 weeks, effective immediately and retroactively to the beginning of 2015.

...Eighteen weeks of paid leave might seem like a financial burden for employers. But the Navy's calculation is that the one- or two-time cost (the typical American mom has two kids) is a long-term bargain that pays off in savings from not having to retrain replacement workers. When Google hiked its maternity leave, the rate at which new moms left the company was cut in half.

Get your free weekly take on the most pertinent, discussed topics of the day >>
Women make up about half of the U.S. workforce but only about 25% of new recruits and only 18% of the Navy's workforce. Female sailors leave the service in great numbers in years five and six, and the top reason is "family." Family is also the No. 2 reason that men leave the Navy, and Mabus is pushing for more leave for new fathers as well as for sailors who adopt children.

Here's a commenter from the LAT's site who sees the side they weren't able to:

daveffloyd Rank 1614
So, navy women have joined other women in being able to get pregnant(will they have to be married?)and then get time off. What compensation do women who do not want to get pregnant or heaven forbid men recieve?

Do "we" get to figure out how much the time off is worth and will the employer compensate "us" for that?

I understand the "I want a career" and yes I can understand the "I need a child" concepts BUT why do the rest of us do without so they can have both and get extra money/paid for it.

Discrimination in the workplace is alive and well when one group can get paid time off and another can't due to gender, belief(I believe there are enough children in the world)or marital status.

What does the single person childless person get? Plus, in this world where technology changes daily what will the cost be to refresh this person's training bringing them up to speed when they are returning after 18 weeks(4 months)off?

Expletives Are Just Words; No Reason To Hang Up On The Dying, Mr. 911 Operator
Although I wrote a book with fuck in the title, no, I don't think it's appropriate at all times. I won't use the word around your 4-year-old or your elderly aunt.

But the word is not a weapon. It does not shoot bullets or cause stab wounds and will not physically harm you in any way.

In other words, the 911 operator who has prissy language rules is not the person who should be working as a 911 operator.

Appallingly, Matthew Sanchez, an Albuquerque 911 dispatcher, hung up on a teen who used the word "fucking" as her friend was dying.

A 911 dispatcher resigned after allegedly hanging up on a teen who called for help after her friend was fatally shot.

...Quintero and Chavez-Silver, both 17, were at a party in Albuquerque earlier this month when someone drove by and opened fire. When her friend was shot, Quintero sprang into action and called 911. But she said she was also panicked.

"I had to stop his bleeding, I had to do CPR to keep him breathing and alive," she said. "I was frantic, I was scared."

On the call, Sanchez can be heard asking Quintero if Chavez-Silver is breathing.

"He's barely breathing," she responds. "How many times do I have to [expletive deleted] tell you?"

It's then that Sanchez ends the call, telling Quintero, "You could deal with yourself. I'm not going to deal with this."

Though officials told KOAT that emergency services were already on the way at that point, Quintero said she couldn't believe the way the call ended.

"I said, 'How could he do that,' and I just dropped my phone," she told KOAT.

"Black Lives Matter" Rally; White Reporter Not Welcome
Never mind that Cleveland State University is a public university. A white reporter, Brandon Blackwell, was expelled from a "Movement For Black Lives" rally at the university.

A reporter was harassed at a "Movement for Black Lives" rally at Cleveland State University after an announcement to the crowd that "this is a peoples of African descent space. If you are not of African descent please go to the outside of the circle immediately."

That according to a video circulating which shows reporter Brandon Blackwell, who is not of African descent, quickly retreat to the back of the gathering amidst cheers from activists surrounding him, seemingly in support of the banishment.

...The video concludes with Blackwell repeatedly asking one activist to not touch his camera.

"I got 800 black people behind me, what the f**k are you gonna do?" replied the activist, while standing face to face with Blackwell.

Ugly -- and stupid.

Just as I say I'm a humanist rather than a feminist -- because I care about and stand up for people's rights, not just those of people with vaginas -- people who care about people's rights care about them regardless of skin color.

Shutting people out because they're white is racist and ugly.

And it hurts your cause.

The video:

Oh, and on a biology note, the people who threw Blackwell out for not being of "African descent" are ignorant. As Stephen Pinker writes in The Blank Slate:

So men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. Men and women are from Africa, the cradle of our evolution, where they evolved together as a single species.

Again Today! Nice Prices For People Who Sometimes Say F*ck
Today again, my book seems to be on special or at an oddly low price at Amazon -- half off, at $7.61 (list price $14.99). Not sure how long it will stay that way (might be part of a pricing algorithm at Amazon).

It's a science-based and funny book on how we can behave less counterproductively.

Along with positive reviews in the WSJ and other publications, Library Journal gave the book a starred review: "Verdict: Solid psychology and a wealth of helpful knowledge and rapier wit fill these pages. Highly recommended."

Orders of the book (new only, not used!) help support my writing on this blog and my answering questions that won't make my column.

The Drinking Age Should Be Lowered -- Fast
There's a piece I very much agree with at Newsweek.com by Jeffrey A. Tucker. Robert Cialdini has a whole chapter on how "scarcity" ramps up desire in his book Influence (a fantastic book on the science of persuasion).

Not being able to access alcohol and having being forbidden gives alcohol a cachet in college that it wouldn't have otherwise and leads to college students drinking high-powered concoctions -- much as people did with homemade hooch during Prohibition:

Most of these kids have never been socialized in what it means to drink responsibly. They are living for the thrill that comes with defiance. The combination of new freedom, liquor and sexual opportunity leads to potentially damaged lives.

How do these kids get away with this? In fraternities and sororities, it all happens on private property, not public and commercial spaces, and so campus police can look the other way. Most everyone does.

Indeed, being able to drink with friends, and unhampered by authority, is a major appeal of the Greek system on campus. It's a way to get around the preposterously high drinking age. Getting around this law will consume a major part of the energy and creativity of these kids for the next three years.

As for everyone else who cannot afford to join, it's all about a life of sneaking around, getting to know older friends, lying and hiding, pregaming before parties just in case there is no liquor there, and generally adopting a life of bingeing and purging, blackouts and hangovers, rising and repeating. And so on it goes for years until finally the dawn of what the state considers adulthood.

For an entire class of people, it's the Roaring Twenties all over again.

It's all part of Prohibition's legacy and a reflection of this country's strange attitudes toward drinking in general. The drinking age in the United States (21), adopted in 1984, is one of the highest in the world. Countries that compare in severity are only a few, including Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Cameroon, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Sri Lanka and Tajikistan.

Most of the rest of the world has settled on 18 for liquor and 16 for beer and wine. In practice, most European countries have very low enforcement of even that. Somehow it works just fine for them.

...What we need is a normal environment of parental and community supervision so that such drinking can occur in a responsible way. Yes, kids will probably drink more often, and yes, more kids will probably try alcohol, but they can do so in an environment of safety and responsibility.

Bringing it into the light, rather than driving it underground, is the best way to solve bingeing and abuse.

I've described here before how my dad would offer us a sip of what he was drinking and how I tried drinking for the first time at my cousin's wedding because my parents were there, and I knew nothing bad would happen to me. I ended up throwing up at the side of the road. My dad laughed at me for overdoing it.

This attitude did not breed a desire to get trashed at college. Quite the contrary. When drinking hasn't been forbidden -- as it is not in France, for example -- it becomes just part of life and not part of life that you're determined to do to defy authority.

Sure, some kids will become drunks under these circumstances. But drinking itself doesn't cause alcoholism, and kids taught to drink in moderation are going to be less likely to be alcohol abusers.

There is an organization of college administrators who are fed up. It is called the Amethyst Initiative. Currently, 135 colleges have signed support for a lower drinking age. Their goal is not to encourage more drinking but to recognize the unreality of the current law, and how it has led to perverse consequences on campus.

You know the situation has to be extremely serious to get this risk-averse crowd on board. Their statement reads:

A culture of dangerous, clandestine "binge-drinking"--often conducted off-campus--has developed. Alcohol education that mandates abstinence as the only legal option has not resulted in significant constructive behavioral change among our students.

Adults under 21 are deemed capable of voting, signing contracts, serving on juries and enlisting in the military, but are told they are not mature enough to have a beer. By choosing to use fake IDs, students make ethical compromises that erode respect for the law.

t's not just about campus. It's about teens and drinking in general. The law requires them to hide in private places. Such clandestine meetings can lead to compromising and dangerous situations without reliable public oversight.

It's also about business. Convenience stores and bars, in particular, have been put in a strange position. They have been enlisted to become the enforcement arm of an unenforceable policy, which has meant haranguing customers, inventing new systems for ferreting out violators, turning the servers into cops, confiscating IDs and creating an environment of snooping and threats in a place that should be about service and fun.

Why isn't something done to change this? Those who are most affected have the least political power. By the time they figure out the ropes in American political life, they are turning 21 and so no longer have to deal with the problem.

Turning College-Aged Citizens Into Toddlers With "Affirmative Consent"
Who would have thought that in 2015, fifty-some years after the start of the "free love" 1960s, that government would be all up in college students' sex lives?

But government is -- and never mind if your kind of sex life is like mine: where consent is something you don't get on videotape or in writing or ask for before every sex act, a la "May I lick your right nipple? May I twist your left nipple and then slowly lick it?"

Wendy Kaminer writes in the Boston Globe about the affirmative consent rules imposed on college campuses by California law and that Federal money (that is, the prospect of it being withheld) is being used to force these rules on other campuses around the country.

It's unlikely that any students will consistently comply with the new rules, which are difficult to reconcile with the realities of sexual interactions, and, in any case, it's unclear what compliance might entail. New York's law requires "knowing [and] voluntary" consent, "given by words or actions . . . creat[ing] clear permission . . . to engage in sexual activity," including any "intentional [sexual] touching, either directly or through the clothing." Consent to any sexual act -- or touch -- may not be inferred from consent to prior acts, which means that consent should be repeated and ongoing. Is this law meant to be taken literally? Maybe.

"It's a question of putting everyone on notice that they have to be in a consensual situation," New York Assemblywoman Deborah Glick, told The New York Times. "It also sends a message to the institutions that they have to up their game on how sexual assault on campus is viewed and treated."

How dare Glick tell the rest of us how sex is supposed to play out?

Kaminer gets it right:

What's wrong with teaching students and administrators that "yes means yes"? Nothing, but affirmative consent laws are not teaching tools. They mandate punitive rules that operate like quasi-criminal laws on campus, posing serious risks of expulsion to students accused of not obtaining consent for every move or for acting on mistaken impressions of implied consent. Assault accusations will be relatively easy to sustain, especially under the minimal standard of proof now applied in campus cases. Disproving assault, by establishing scrupulous compliance with affirmative consent policies, will be much harder. How might a student demonstrate that he repeatedly obtained consent? "Your guess is as good as mine," admitted California Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal, who coauthored that state's law.

When advocates of these laws acknowledge the difficulty of proving consent, when they praise regulations of alleged sexual assaults for "sending messages," they're implicitly endorsing discriminatory enforcement. Affirmative consent policies are not designed to govern every encounter. They're designed to bring about findings of guilt, or responsibility when rape accusations are leveled -- mainly against men accused of assaulting women.

Nice Prices For People Who Sometimes Say F*ck
For some reason, my book seems to be on special or at an oddly low price at Amazon -- half off, at $7.61 (list price $14.99). Not sure how long it will stay that way (might be part of a pricing algorithm at Amazon).

It's a science-based and funny book on how we can behave less counterproductively.

Along with positive reviews in the WSJ and other publications, Library Journal gave the book a starred review: "Verdict: Solid psychology and a wealth of helpful knowledge and rapier wit fill these pages. Highly recommended."

Orders of the book (new only, not used!) help support my writing on this blog and my answering questions that won't make my column.

Californians paid 22% to 88% more for individual health coverage this year than last, commissioner says.

Do the LA Times reporters not have a search index for their own paper?

From the Pfeifer piece:

At a news conference Tuesday, Jones said individuals this year paid between 22% and 88% more for individual health insurance policies than they did last year, depending on age, gender, type of policy and where they lived.

The increases did not affect poor people, whose policies are heavily subsidized, Jones said. The study results released Tuesday did not include group policies such as those offered by employers.

Jones said he authorized the study of health insurance rates after receiving numerous complaints about rising costs.

"The rate increase from 2013 to 2014, on average, was significantly higher than rate increases in the past," Jones said.

The hardest-hit were young people, he said. In one region of Los Angeles County, people age 25 paid 52% more for a silver plan than they had for a similar plan the year before, while someone age 55 paid 38% more, Jones said.

Yes, 25-year-olds, you're out of college, deep in debt from student loans for college costs that are far greater than they've ever been, and you're paying for your dad's golf partner to have cheaper health care. (Aren't you glad you campaigned for Obama?)

Police Raid First, Figure Out What They're Raiding Later
This is how innocent people get killed -- when the police come in all SWAT team without asking questions first. Alex Horton, who himself conducted raids on insurgents in Iraq, writes in the WaPo about the police raid on his apartment:

I had conducted the same kind of raid on suspected bombmakers and high-value insurgents. But the Fairfax County officers in my apartment were aiming their weapons at a target whose rap sheet consisted only of parking tickets and an overdue library book.

...I spread my arms out to either side. An officer jumped onto my bed and locked handcuffs onto my wrists. The officers rolled me from side to side, searching my boxers for weapons, then yanked me up to sit on the edge of the bed.

At first, I was stunned. I searched my memory for any incident that would justify a police raid. Then it clicked.

Earlier in the week, the managers of my apartment complex moved me to a model unit while a crew repaired a leak in my dishwasher. But they hadn't informed my temporary neighbors. So when one resident noticed the door slightly cracked open to what he presumed was an unoccupied apartment, he looked in, saw me sleeping and called the police to report a squatter.

Sitting on the edge of the bed dressed only in underwear, I laughed. The situation was ludicrous and embarrassing. My only mistake had been failing to make sure the apartment door was completely closed before I threw myself into bed the night before.

...When I later visited the Fairfax County police station to gather details about what went wrong, I met the shift commander, Lt. Erik Rhoads. I asked why his officers hadn't contacted management before they raided the apartment. Why did they classify the incident as a forced entry, when the information they had suggested something innocuous? Why not evaluate the situation before escalating it?

Rhoads defended the procedure, calling the officers' actions "on point." It's not standard to conduct investigations beforehand because that delays the apprehension of suspects, he told me.

Rhoads also defends the approach on grounds of officer safety. But civilian safety should be a priority, too -- to the point where you sometimes, yes, delay or even miss the apprehension of suspects...until you're sure that you've, say, got the right apartment and have evidence that the people in it are guilty of something other than overdue library books.

Oh, and did I mention that I was the victim here? A woman hit my parked car. No, my parked car did not leap up out of the space and slam into hers. Which is why her insurance company ended up giving me $661 for the damage her car did to mine.

So...why was the LAPD outside my house at 11 p.m., using their patrol car loudspeaker, "Amy Alkon, come out of the house"?

Oh, it's such fun to pretend you're the SWAT team when there's a 51-year-old woman in the house who is only guilty of being a few days behind in giving her dog a bath. (I don't do drugs -- though I support what should be your right to do them. I even stop at stop signs. Completely.)

Deelz!!
Really good today-only deal! 61 percent off Level One Rosetta Stone language software. I have this for French and it's great -- helped me correct my lame-ass pronunciation, which I thought nobody could do.

Sandra Bland: With The Full 52 Minute Tape, The Thug Cop's Wrongdoing Is Clear
We don't have laws that demand you speak in a cheery and kowtowing tone to a cop.

Yet, not doing that seems to be what led to Bland's arrest and subsequent death in jail -- maybe with a few scoops of DWB: Driving While Black.

Ty Burr posts the 52-minute video and the story at the Boston Globe -- the parts of the story you probably haven't seen or heard:

The second [half of the story] comes several minutes later, the camera continuing to record as Bland's car is searched, and Encinia, sitting in his vehicle, can be heard discussing the incident with his sergeant. Here is where we hear the trooper revise the narrative of what has just occurred, unconsciously or not, so that he can come out the level-headed good guy.

At 23:35 on the tape, he says "I tried to de-escalate her and I wasn't getting anywhere at all. . . . I tried talking to her, calming her down, and that was not working. I'm trying to get her detained, trying to get her to calm down, just calm her down, stop throwing your arms around. She never swung at me, just flailing, stomping around, and I said, all right, that's enough, and that's when I detained her."

This is in flagrant contradiction of everything we've just witnessed; it is, quite simply, a lie. At no time did Trooper Encinia attempt to "de-escalate" the situation with Bland. On the contrary, he pushed it forward until it exploded -- until he exploded.

Still talking with his supervisor, Encinia is heard reading the definitions of "assault" and "resisting arrest," trying to decide which charge would best fit. 27:00: "I kinda lean toward assault rather than resist. I mean, technically, she's under arrest when the traffic stop is initiated. You're not free to go. I didn't say 'you're under arrest,' 'stop, hands up.' That did not occur. There was just the assault part."

Welcome to American roadside justice, where you're arrested the moment you're pulled over and they figure out what for later. 33:58: Encinia is laughing by now. The sergeant apparently asks if he was hurt in the incident. "I got some cuts on my hand," he replies. "I guess it is an injury. I don't need medical attention. I got three little circles from I guess the handcuffs when she was twisting away from me." This will later morph into further proof that Bland assaulted Encinia. Again the trooper insists, "I only took enough force as seemed necessary -- I even de-escalated once we were on the pavement."

He seems to believe it by now. It sounds good, true, strong. He has convinced himself he's a decent guy. That he did the right thing.

Absolute abuse of power.

Here's the 52-minute tape, starting with Texas state trooper Brian Encinia's chatty warning to the woman he pulled over before Bland:

Growing up with autism is a never-ending series of lessons in how people without autism expect the rest of the world to relate to them. This goes double for those who -- like me -- went undiagnosed until adulthood: the instructions are far less explicit and the standards are higher. "Stop drumming your pencil, don't you know you're distracting people?" "Don't be so direct, don't you know you're being insulting?" "Put yourself in her shoes -- when are you going to develop a sense of empathy?" Invariably, the autistic behaviour is marked as less-than, called out as needing to change. So we adapt; we learn to keep our "abnormal" attitudes and behaviours to ourselves in the hope of blending in, and when we discover communities where, by chance, we fit in a little better without having to try so hard, we cling to those safe spaces like a drowning man clings to a lifebuoy.

I stumbled into my first such space when I was eight, and its name was FidoNet. I didn't think of myself as a programmer back then, just a girl who liked fractals and science fiction and BASIC on my IBM PCjr, but the virtual world of BBS message boards made orders of magnitude more sense than the everyday world of classrooms, sports teams, church groups and grade-school social dynamics.

Nobody on FidoNet ever told me "no girls allowed" -- or even implied it, at least to an extent that I might have picked up on -- and as a result, the assertion that "technology is a boys' club" has always been foreign to me. Sure, I was always one of a scant handful of girls in the after-school computer or science club, but none of that mattered when there were NASA missions or flight simulator games to geek out on. I was well into my twenties before anyone of any gender thought to remark on the rarity of a woman being interested in the finer points of, e.g., C++ memory management; I'd come from the Midwest to my very first tech conference, and at the time I was far more amazed by the sheer concentration of people who were interested in C++ at all. I made friends largely by virtue of not knowing who I was supposed to be impressed by. I was there because I loved working with technology, and I gravitated to people who shared the same passions. Everything else was background noise.

I have since been made painfully aware that my experience is atypical. Every time, it has been a woman who has done so. Every time, it has been a lesson in how the woman I am talking with expects the tech world to relate to her and other people like her.

...Ironically, I have been discriminated against in the tech world because of my gender; I just didn't notice until it was brought to my attention long after the fact. Several years ago, I posted an idea for a new feature to the developers' mailing list for an open-source project I used. It got one reply -- a few questions from another list member -- and the thread ended there. Those questions helped me refine my thinking about the feature, and over the next few months, I implemented it. Much later -- after I'd presented my implementation at a couple of user groups and conferences -- one of the commit-bit holders for the project mentioned to me that there had been some additional discussion of my proposal, on the private commit-bit holders' mailing list. There had been interest, but one of the committers had dismissed the idea out of hand because a woman had proposed it. It was the funniest thing I'd heard in months -- I literally doubled over laughing at how nonplussed he must have been to see it not only implemented, but implemented to rousing success.

The world will not always be your oyster. Not if you're a woman, not if you're a man.

What do you do? Instead of whining, you keep doing -- till you're so good they'd hire you if you were a tree frog.